Motley Is Mainstream At The Fringe Fling
The Age
Saturday October 7, 2006
Daniel Ziffer mingles with punk rockers and 1950s housewives at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
PUNKS scream their love, a motivational speaker gives sex advice and a refugee cries for her father while a matron makes lamingtons and polite conversation. It's a typical Thursday night for an arts festival that doesn't do "typical".With hundreds of events and thousands of practitioners, the The Age Melbourne Fringe Festival is full of possibilities. Its new creative director, Kath Melbourne, is guiding The Age through a night on the town, watching artists experiment - and asking audiences to take the leap with them."What do you get when you cross Chekhov with experimental jazz ballet?" asks comedian Greg Fleet at the Festival Club in North Melbourne. "An arts grant!" The joke, playing on a stereotype about festival shows that often blend artistic disciplines for mixed results, gets a big laugh. "Fringe means never having to say sorry," he says. Earlier, at Federation Square, we stand in front of what looks like a gingerbread house. But instead of dough, the walls are built of plastic-coated panels, filled with personal items. This is Material World and the objects - baby clothing, magazines, rejection letters - come from local asylum seekers."My dad, I miss him," reads a note in childish scrawl pinned to an orange gingham doll. "To all the lovely friends I made in Aussy," reads another.This is one of the first projects Ms Melbourne adopted when she took on the Fringe job in March. Sitting in the kitchen of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, she would help children stitch dolls and talk about their experiences. Ms Melbourne, who grew up in Queensland before moving to Sydney, and later Preston, formerly ran youth theatre company Platform in Darebin. This is her first festival and it is a monster. Now in its 24th year, the 19-day festival features about 3500 artists in more than 250 events. She is clearly enjoying herself. "After working by yourself for so long, you find out what you like doing," she says, smiling broadly.In an underground gallery in Flinders Lane, Gavin Brown walks us through interior exterior, an exhibition of portraits of the beautiful and vacuous. As inspiration for the exhibition, which closes today, the painter relied on thousands of images torn from magazines."I use Italian Vogue, anything with that operatic note about them," he says, describing the large, baroque works.In one painting, naked women lounge and play cards as men with hulking six-packs and metrosexual suits look on. In another, a red-carpet line of celebrities descends into a frenzy of desperation.Almost 60 performances are scheduled for the festival's hub, the North Melbourne Town Hall, drawing a vibrant stream of punters to Errol Street.On the hall's roof, in a tent, we become the "best good friends" of US self-help guru Dr Alex McFarlane, played by comedian Dave Bushell in his solo show I Can't Help Myself. Dr McFarlane cajoles the hopeless "Melborn" audience to realise their inadequacy under the guidance of a man who has had, he admits modestly, "as many as two sexual partners".Down on the ground floor, "Bev" is making lamingtons at her Suburban Dream House. In a floral dress, apron and pearls, she invites punters to step back into the postwar era for a drink. "That's what Fringe is about," she said, wiping up errant shards of coconut. "Just kind of hanging out . . . people doing their thing and having fun."At the hub's Lithuanian Club, German rockers Die Roten Punkte (The Red Dots) are screaming "Danke!" to a raucous crowd. Siblings Astrid and Otto have a psycho-sexual relationship, tiny instruments and a song that is their mantra and mantle: Best Band in the World.As part of this year's festival, the Outside Eye program has linked rising stars with dramaturges and industry professionals. Scott Edgar - Scod from musical comedy group Tripod - has been offering points on the show. "It's another opinion . . . like having an extra brain," he says.Ms Melbourne says the collaboration between seasoned professionals and novices has been productive. "The effect may not be seen in this festival, this year, but the impact of those relationships on the art is just amazing," she says.Outside, the future is waiting - in a van. The Digital Fringe mobile projection unit is broadcasting a film festival onto the wall, before heading out to "culture-jack" billboard images by overlaying them with images of subversion. The van, kitted out with a global positioning system, is taken over by different guest programmers every night. "There's about $10,000 worth of laptops and projectors and you just give it out to these people you don't know," says co-ordinator Justin Schmidt. Anything could happen. And might.The Age Melbourne Fringe Festival closes on Sunday, October 15.
© 2006 The Age